Making Connections

So it’s the mid-1980s and as young men do, Malcolm Gladwell and his friend Jacob Weisberg throw a lot of parties at their Washington D.C. rental on Adams Mill Road and Kenyon Street.

At one such low rent Bacchanalia, Gladwell shoots the breeze with Jefferson Morley, an assistant editor and one of the supervisors along with Michael Kinsley and Dorothy Wickenden of the bright young politico Weisberg at The New Republic.

Gladwell brings up a story Morley wrote for the July 9 1984 edition called “Double Reverse Discrimination.”

In The Washingtonian “Gladwell’s Brain” profile by Chris Wilson on January 8, 2007, Morley recalls:

I remember Malcolm questioning me closely both about the sociology and the ethics of the story.

Morley’s reporting concerned the fate of Brooklyn, New York’s Starrett City, a federally subsidized, 1970s era middle-income housing project built on landfill between the predominantly poor black neighborhood of East, New York and the white working class bastion of Canarsie.

What’s fascinating is that in order for the development to get off the ground, the Starrett Company had to quell the protests of Canarsians who feared that their community would mimic the history of neighboring East New York.

East New York had gone from two-thirds white to three-quarters black between 1960 and 1970 and had deteriorated in the process, its property values plummeting and its crime rate rising.” (“Double Reverse Discrimination,” The New Republic July 9, 1984)

In order to get the New York City Board of Estimate to approve construction, which was under assault by Canarsie’s virulent protests, The Starrett Company agreed to maintain a 70% white occupancy rate. So if you were black or Hispanic or some other loosely defined minority looking to get an apartment at Starrett City, you were out of luck if the 30% quota for your kind was already filled. (President Donald Trump owned a 4% stake in Starrett City). No matter your income or your recommendations or your good-guy-ness.

Five black applicants for apartments didn’t think this agreement was fair and so with the backing of the N.A.A.C.P., they filed a class action discrimination suit against the development in 1979, three years after it opened its doors to tenants. And as these things go, it took about five years for anything to happen after that.

And what happened then is really quite remarkable.

The two sides agreed to settle the case before it went to trial.

They both agreed that the quota controls would remain in effect. Just the percentages would be changed. Instead of a 70/30 white/minority split, they’d move to 67/33. And on May 2, 1984, the Federal District Court in Brooklyn approved the settlement.

Huh? Doesn’t make much sense does it?

Why would the N.A.A.C.P. approve of such a thing, essentially an imposed discrimination policy that shuts out black people purely based upon the color of their skin?

What’s even weirder is that the lawyer defending Starrett City’s White Majority quota was none other than Morris B. Abram, a guy who’d made his name representing Martin Luther King, Jr. And Abram had said himself on numerous occasions that race was an “absurd, unfair, and counterproductive” way of evaluating people. So why did he defend the right of a real estate company to do exactly what he felt was wrong?

What was the thing behind these counterintuitive stances? It sure must have been a powerful and convincing idea. The N.A.A.C.P. and Abram weren’t afraid of a good fight. And this seemed like a great one.

So what gives?

Gladwell probably noticed that Morley referenced the controlling idea ten times in his article without explaining where it came from. Hence Morley’s recollection that Gladwell was interested in the sociology and the ethics of the story…the thing behind the thing that made these formidable forces agree that in this case, and by extension other cases like it, a discriminatory quota keeping black people from living where they wished was in the long term in their best interest.

That’s not a knock on Morley. The New Republic was a serious magazine that fact checked and edited each of its pieces with vigor. It was known for that discipline until the whole Stephen Glass series of boners in the late 90s. But that’s another kettle of fish entirely.

The fact that Morley didn’t need to do a one or two-paragraph background write up about the idea only spoke to its prevalence as a incontrovertible and accepted fact amongst the players in the Starrett City drama. And for that matter, readers of The New Republic too.

So what was this idea?

It was an idea first put forth in 1957 by University of Chicago Sociologist Morton Grodzins in the October issue of Scientific American.

White residents, who will tolerate a few Negroes as neighbors, either willingly or unwillingly, begin to move out when the proportion of Negroes in the neighborhood or apartment building passes a certain critical point. This tip point varies from city to city and from neighborhood to neighborhood. But for the vast majority of white Americans a tip point exists. Once it is exceeded, they will no longer stay among Negro neighbors. (Emphasis mine)

But how did this theory result in what Morley refers to in his piece as “the generally accepted 30% ‘tipping point’” of black residents that caused whites to flee the neighborhood?

In the 60s and 70s, urban areas became less and less diverse. It became known as the “white flight” phenomenon. Attracted by the volatility of the issue and its blatant racial overtones, other academics climbed aboard Grodzins “tipping point” train, giving it more and more weight and eventually making it ubiquitous along the way. Repetition has a way of doing that.

Harvard’s Thomas Schelling, a future Nobel Laureate in Economics and renowned game theorist who contributed to Stanley Kubrick’s creation of Dr. Strangelove, picked up on the notion and theorized further in his papers “Models of Segregation” in 1969 and “Dynamic Models of Segregation” in 1971. Using elaborate game theories, Schelling’s conclusions in his 1978 book Micromotives and Macrobehavior gave birth to that 30% tipping point number.

And then there was Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians and Irish of New York City, which challenged the whole “assimilation” model of American life. Americans don’t shed their ancestral identities. They embrace them. Morley characterized Glazer in his piece as the one “who most forcefully made the point in the early 1970s that whites’ fears of blacks were profound and in many ways justified.”

But geez, if behaviors are tipped so predictably one way, couldn’t they tip back just as predictably? Gladwell may well have thought or even put forth to Morley over a beer or two.

All of this Tipping Point stuff must have fascinated him back in the mid-80s and picking the brain of Jefferson Morley was cool too. But what could Gladwell really “do” with the idea? Especially when the next day he had to call Pfizer to check up on their progress getting a new pill approved by the FDA.

He couldn’t do anything with it.

So, he sealed it in a virtual sardine can and stuck it with the rest of the cans in the idea pantry in the back of his mind.

And then, over a decade later when Gladwell looked at crime statistics in New York City and discovered how drastically they had plummeted in just five years time, he made a connection. It was a connection that went all the way back to the conversation with Jefferson Morley at the party he’d thrown with his friend Jacob Weisberg.

Maybe Tipping Points are not just interesting explanations for physics, epidemiology, and sociology…perhaps they’re applicable to crime too? And if they’re applicable to crime, what other phenomena could they explain?

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6 Comments

Michael Beverlyon December 22, 2017 at 6:54 am

It’s interesting how a simple idea is so obvious when it’s explained.
Tipping points.
Black Swans.
Antifragility.
And going back…an evolutionary biologist describes “memes” in a seminal book that launched his career as a writer/lecturer and today people assuming Mark Zuckerberg invented them.

Shawn,
I like the metaphor of the sardine cans. It is a good addition to Steve’s use of the empty white box. There is always something to draw upon.
I know you are speaking of something more complex but I really detest game theory (nothing personal, Malcolm) so I’m going to go somewhere else with this and jump to chaos theory.
One of the things that chaos theory explains is that chaos comes into some kind of order. Always. So if I use the white box: There is always something in it. If I acknowledge the kajillion sardine cans at the back of my mind: there is a always something that will emerge. It might be a chaos package waiting for it’s moment to be born. Maybe the cans represent chaos ideas. If I acknowledge chaos theory: if I keep at it working with the process, order and shape will emerge.
This is how Larry David works. He keeps a notebook on him and writes down ideas. Then he transfers these to a better notebook. Then he lets the stories combine. That’s how he got more than one idea to resolve at each ending. He loves doing this. And we love it too. So I am interested in allowing those (look out… new metaphor) threads to weave themselves through me.

Another very interesting point of this article is that writers take years accumulating enough experience to make deep connections – definitely in nonfiction and often in fiction as well. It’s paying enough attention to our unique experiences, observations, and thoughts that pays off when sitting at the keyboard!